5 Conclusion
Given previous research that details the negative implications for African children living away from
their biological parents, the results of this paper are somewhat surprising. This paper systematically
analyzes the school enrollment outcomes of children living away from their parents and finds a
Pareto improvement in school enrollment due to the institution of fostering and a household’s
ability to adjust its structure. On average, all children in the households involved in fostering (host
siblings in the receiving household, biological siblings in the sending household, and the foster child)
experience an increase in school enrollment relative to children from non-fostering households, and
this impact is largest for the youngest children.
For economists who often assume there should be gains from trade between willing parties, these
results should not be viewed with surprise. Two households that choose to reallocate resources by
sending a child from the biological parents to the host family would only do so if there was the
expectation of an improvement in each household’s welfare. The host household would be unlikely
to receive a child if that was going to make them worse off, and likewise, the sending household
would not send a child if that was going to make them worse off. I find that not only are the two
households not worse off, but they actually experience an improvement in their children’s school
enrollment. This has significant policy implications for international development organizations
who are currently trying to prevent children from growing up away from their biological parents.
These results about the impact of a household adjusting its structure have implications for
the larger issue in Africa and even the United States of how to define a household and what is
the appropriate unit of analysis for studying the impact on a child’s welfare outcomes. A large
literature in the United States analyzes the schooling and health outcomes of children who live
in non-traditional household structures and generally finds that not having the biological mother
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